Emily Paull

A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki Canongate (Text in Australia) 9780857867971 This review constitutes part of a challenge undertaken by myself and Simon from The Blether . Theodore Adorno is quoted as saying "There can be no poetry after Auschwitz." Does this mean there can be no poetry after 9/11?  After the Tsunami that rocked the coast of Japan in 2011?  What about MH370? The truth of the matter is that words are one of the only ways that the human species knows how to console themselves in the face of tragedy.  I think perhaps it comes from an impulse towards closure, a need to explore the why and how of big events.  Writing can also serve the meditative purpose of helping a person come to terms with the fact that sometimes there can be no explanation. A Tale for the Time Being  by Ruth Ozeki is a novel which explores the liminal space pre and post Tsunami in Japanese culture.  It is narrated by two voices: by Nao, (Yasutani Naoko) ...

A personal reflection on whether or not I should have just gone to Law School I'm going to be controversial here and say that the first time I read Hanif Kureishi's article slamming creative writing classes, I was almost inclined to agree with him.  Kureishi, who teaches at Kingston University, was quoted in an article posted by The Guardian online on Wednesday, March 5th as saying that creative writing courses are a "waste of time" and that "a lot of [his] students just can't tell a story." Now if you want to read an excellent piece defending the teaching of creative writing, I direct you to this piece by Annabel Smith, which includes several interviews with people involved in some way in a creative writing course.  This blog post is not designed or intended to be a rebuttal, but is rather a think piece in which I detail how my thinking about studying creative writing has changed in the years since I finished the course. "a lot of my studen...

I have been tagged in a blog hop by Emma Chapman, author of breakaway hit, How to be a Good Wife .  I first came across Emma's work at last year's Perth Writers Festival, and was immediately impressed by her ability to describe honestly and beautiful the human form.  There are also other amazing things about Emma's writing that you too will discover if you read her book, which is available at all good bookstores. Without further ado... 1) What am I working on now? I'm currently in the middle of the eighth draft of my novel, Between the Sleepers , which I began when I was in Year 12 many moons ago.  It's a historical coming of age novel set in Fremantle in the late 1930s, and follows a working class boy named Winston who meets and falls in love with a middle class darling who seems determined to lead him into a world of jazz, heartbreak and war. 2) How does my work differ from others in it's genre? Well, I don't know how this applies to other books...

My mother, Megan, is an extremely intelligent woman who often says she would like to write a crime novel.  If anyone could do it, it is her.  As it is, she's a busy academic who still finds time to devour at least two novels a week.  These novels are usually crime novels.  As I don't usually read crime, I thought perhaps it might be nice if every now and then, I got her to review something she rather liked for you all, seeing as my bias away from crime is surely not shared by all my readers.  In the style of Triple J's breakfast program, in which they ask their fathers to review the feature albums, I now bring you My Mum Reviews. Heist Robert Schofield Allen and Unwin As an avid reader of crime fiction, I picked up Heist and read the blurb: an inauspicious start I thought, but enough to get me to start reading.  From the first I could see this as a movie.  The settings lend themselves to the action movie, and it was easy to see how th...

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves  Karen Joy Fowler, 2014 Serpent's Tail Books 9781846689956 I love Karen Joy Fowler.  She's the perfect mix of sassy and verbose.  She's Marian Keyes meets Zadie Smith and I find all of her books entertaining and educational.  So it really wasn't a surprise to me that my gut reaction, on seeing a copy of her new book, was to snap it up and then race through what I was already reading so I could bump it WAY up my to read pile. On first examination, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves seems to be the typical American family novel set in the late nineties.  Think The Virgin Suicides - there is something dark in the family's past, but the narrator isn't going to tell you what yet.  Rosemary Cooke is 22 and studying her way through almost the entire course catalogue of Davis University, California.  She doesn't have many friends, so it is as strange to her as to everyone else when she gets arrested for thr...

The Weaver Fish Robert Edeson, 2014 Fremantle Press 9781922089526 It's been quite interesting to observe the recent branching out of Fremantle Press titles into new and perhaps more typically 'masculine' genres (although arguably there is no such real category, but that's a discussion for another day.)  Earlier in the year I reviewed Ray Glickman's Reality, a psychological thriller where a reality program is enacted on six unsuspecting Perth residents.  Today's title, The Weaver Fish , is similarly influenced by crime and thriller nuances. Edeson was the recipient of the 2012 TAG Hungerford Award, supported by the friends and family of the late Bill Warnock, and from 2014 the award will be sponsored by the Fremantle city council.  It is an award which seeks out fresh new writing from unpublished writers in Australia, and usually manages to unearth books which are fresh, surprising and inspiring.  The 2012 award was plagued by excellent submissions, wit...

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Claire North Orbit Books 9780356502564 Publication date: 1st April 2014 How to classify a book like this one?  It's something of a quandary.  It's not historical fiction, though it takes place at the same time as a number of notable twentieth century events like World War 2, and Vietnam, but it's also not a science fiction novel, despite involving a form of time travel.  Part counter-factual history, part spy thriller a la James Bond, complete with top secret research facilities behind the Iron Curtain, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August avoids categorisation by being many things at once, and I think because this has been done so well, it would be safe to say regardless of genre, the book will be a best seller. But while this is 'Claire North's' first book, it's not the author's.  It appears, from an obscure author's note tucked away at the end of the book, that the creator of Harry August is no st...